Useless Silicon…

Want to know how to make a little square piece of silicon absolutely worthless? Process it to contain 63 million transistors (say, to be a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 core), each pumping electrons to-and-fro, allow this switching to heat up the silicon really hot and then make sure the fan on the heatsink is broken. This should ruin all those submicron oxide layers and other tiny features and make your GPU a piece of worthless silicon. Which is what exactly happened to my trusty ASUS VT9280. It was quite a workhorse, even though it was at the low-end of the GeForce 4 cards. It served me well for almost 3 years, so I can’t complain too much. The little fan pumped as much as it could but lately I had noticed it was sounding a bit louder than normal. Then last night it went ka-put, dying a horrible, sizzling death. It has shaded its last pixel and verticed its last vertex. A moment of silence, if you please.

Thank you.

I guess I should see this as somewhat of a boon. This gives me a chance to upgrade to a better card and not feel guilty (or feel the proverbial heat from the buttonWife, since she uses the PC, too). I decided not to go all out on the new card, but I didn’t skimp either. I’m still an nVidia guy, so I’m sticking with the family with a new EVGA e-GeForce 6600 GT. The card is a bit old but I think it will suffice just fine. I’m not running DOOM3 at insane resolutions, I just want to get back to some Guild Wars. I’m going through withdrawls and I need a fix. Lucky for me, I snagged a good deal on the card and I’m excited about my new hardware. It’s like my birthday or something.

I didn’t get around to installing it tonight but hopefully this time tomorrow I’ll be running around Ascalon, powered by my new trusty 6600 GT.